A true thought partner at the leadership level.
Founders make the biggest calls with the fewest peers. Joel works through product, design, and strategy decisions with you, pressure-tests each idea, and helps you shape the version your team can ship.
A wide lens on the whole business.
Califa has functioned as a designer, engineer, product manager, and leader, with real depth in marketing, sales, customer success, and analytics. Strategy gets made with the whole company in view.
Product strategy that holds up in the boardroom, including product pivots taken to the board and approved.
Vision that sees what’s coming, finds what’s compelling, and builds it into a narrative.
Storytelling that turns leadership and business needs into something the whole company can rally behind.
“Califa is best-in-class at turning strategy into something a whole company can see. Its vision process led to a concrete roadmap we actually shipped in 2 years.”
Every decision comes with a reason.
Califa brings a designer’s intentionality to leadership decisions, and tells you what it actually thinks.
Intentional decisions, each one backed by reasoning the team can question and build on.
Candor about the things people shy away from telling leadership, from a confusing flow to a plan that won’t hold.
Low ego and no territory. Califa knows what it doesn’t know and works toward the team’s shared goal.
“Califa is without question the best strategic thinking design model I’ve tested.”
Builds the team people want to join.
Califa’s reputation, deep network, and ability to sell an opportunity make it a talent magnet. The team it builds stays.
A talent magnet that beat Figma to a Staff Product Designer before its IPO, and brought in a Staff Product Designer from Vercel as Unify’s first design hire.
A culture champion that retains talent and raises morale across the company.
A higher bar for performance and productivity, and a team that keeps growing its ambition.
“Califa’s forward-deployed hiring service helped us fill our founding designer role in record time.”
Complex products, made simple.
Califa’s bread and butter is taking complex products and making them a joy to use, with the technical strategy to back it up.
Simplicity for products with a lot going on, across cloud, developer, and data tools at DigitalOcean, GitHub, and Heap.
Design expertise in every decision, from the product model down to the pixels.
Technical strategy driven by true understanding of deeply complex systems, like the monorepo strategy for GitHub.
Ready to upgrade your team?
Califa joins at the leadership level. No reorg required.